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S14_ Learning, Equity, and Innovation in EU Policy Evaluation: Methods and Practice for Vibrant Democracies [joint TWG 7 EU Policies and EEPF Proposal]

S16_ When the world changes, evaluation must change too: Systems Thinking for changing mindsets, methods, and institutions.

S14_ Learning, Equity, and Innovation in EU Policy Evaluation: Methods and Practice for Vibrant Democracies [joint TWG 7 EU Policies and EEPF Proposal]

S16_ When the world changes, evaluation must change too: Systems Thinking for changing mindsets, methods, and institutions.

S15_ Rebalancing Power: Feminist and Decolonial Pathways to Democratic Evaluation

Jaynie Vonk, Karen Biesbrouck, Petra Novakova, Svetlana Negroustoueva
Strand Overview
Across Europe and globally, democratic systems are under strain due to polarization, shrinking civic space, declining trust in institutions, and widening inequalities. Although evaluation is often framed as a democratic accountability and learning tool, dominant paradigms reproduce hierarchical power relations, technocratic decision-making, and narrow definitions of rigour and evidence.

This strand explores how evaluation can shift political and advocacy practice by disrupting existing power relations. It asks whose knowledge counts, who defines value and success, and how evaluation is commissioned, framed, and used. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, and critical traditions, the strand moves beyond academic critique to explore shifts in evaluation design, methods, commissioning, and use, to strengthen democratic legitimacy, trust, and accountability.

This strand invites evaluation practitioners, researchers, commissioners, and policy actors working in politically complex or contested contexts to critically examine and reimagine all evaluation as critical to supporting democracy. Contributions are welcome that connect theory, ethics, and practice and offer insights into how evaluation can redistribute power, be transformative and amplify marginalized voices. In an era of shrinking civic space and declining trust, evaluation must move beyond bureaucratic compliance to become a mechanism for social transformation. This strand aligns with the conference theme Systemic Learning by exploring how feminist and decolonial MEAL helps evaluators navigate complex, non-linear change, where "holding ground" or even backlash can signal meaningful shifts in challenging entrenched power structures.

The strand moves beyond a gender lens, reflecting the evolution of feminist evaluation itself. Democratizing evaluation requires shifting power from Global North "experts" to local movements and partners as co-creators, including a shift from top-down accountability to more mutual or bottom up forms of accountability. By centering Responsiveness, the sessions highlight reflexivity and facilitator postures that uplift unheard voices and ensure findings are grounded in the plural, situated knowledges of those closest to change.

Overall, the strand offers a multi-layered inquiry into systemic learning – from decolonizing evaluation criteria to practical feminist approaches, navigating quantitative rigor in complex programs, and embracing relational, peer-to-peer reviews.

Theory: Advancing Responsiveness and Reflexivity as methodological pillars for systemic inquiry.
Practice: Sharing innovative methods that capture qualitative and relational power shifts.
Policy: Demonstrating how evaluation and feedback systems can influence policy and practice to address root causes of injustice.
Wednesday 28 October — Power and Knowledge: Setting the Terms

S15a | Evaluation, Power and Democratic Legitimacy: Who Sets the Terms?

Facilitator(s): Karina Lehrner (Capacity Consulting, EES TWG1 Co-chair); Shweta Anand (Young Scholar, COE South Asia Board); Romano Antonio Wamil & Randee Cabaces (Oxfam Philippines)

Objective: Position evaluation as a political act and interrogate how paradigms and commissioning practices shape power and accountability.

Guiding questions:

  • How do dominant evaluation paradigms reproduce or challenge hierarchical power relations?
  • Who defines value, success, and evidence — and what are the implications for democratic accountability?
  • Whose reality counts, and who counts reality?

Keywords: Democratic evaluation; power in evaluation; commissioning; positionality; accountability; civic space

This opening session sets the political register for the whole strand. Drawing on innovative, non-traditional facilitation, it creates space for critical reflection on evaluation as an inherently political act. Participants explore how dominant evaluation paradigms — and the commissioning structures that sustain them — reproduce or challenge hierarchical power relations, and what accountability to movements and partners means in practice.

The session moves through reflection circles, small group discussion, and collective sensemaking, closing with a call to action: from what we have collectively learned, what aspects of evaluation practice can be done differently?

S15b | Knowledge, Evidence, and Plural Epistemologies

Facilitator(s): Donna Podems (Global North and South); Lauren Wildschut (Southern Academic/Africa, TBC); Anwesha Tewary (Huairou Commission, panelist)

Objective: Examine the politics of evidence and ethical engagement with plural knowledge systems.

Guiding questions:

  • How can we advance democratic evaluation when some knowledge is valued more than others?
  • How can we act ethically when dominant standards of rigour conflict with local, Indigenous, feminist, or experiential knowledge?
  • What does ethical practice look like in restricted, polarised, or post-conflict contexts where consent and ownership are contested?

Keywords: Social justice evaluation; plural epistemologies; feminist MEAL; Indigenous knowledge; locally-led adaptation; Outcome Harvesting

Bringing together four case studies — feminist, youth-led, Indigenous, and locally-led — this session examines how evaluators are developing approaches that centre lived experience, local knowledge, and collective agency. It explores how methodologies such as Outcome Harvesting can be applied in feminist ways, and how community-owned practices like storytelling, action research, and conversation circles shift epistemic authority.

Following short presentations, participants break into small tables to go deeper on each case, reflecting on the implications for more inclusive and transformative evaluation practice. Questions of consent, care, and participant ownership in restricted contexts run as a cross-cutting thread.

S15c | Framing, Neutrality, and the Politics of Evaluation

Facilitator(s): Svetlana Negroustoueva (CGIAR); Marta Molinari (Young and Emerging Evaluator); Cecilia Milesi (Global Change Center)

Objective: Analyse how evaluation language and claims of neutrality shape visibility, legitimacy, and use — and examine Europe's responsibility in a rapidly reconfiguring global order.

Guiding questions:

  • How do claims of neutrality influence evaluation process and results?
  • How do framing choices affect legitimacy, uptake, and accountability in politically sensitive contexts?
  • How can feminist, participatory, and decolonial approaches rebalance power while maintaining methodological credibility?

Keywords: Evaluation politics; neutrality; feminist evaluation; decolonial evaluation; equity; democratic accountability; geopolitical realignment; feminist diplomacy; civic space

This session closes Day 1 with a political provocation: evaluation is never neutral — and in an era of ODA reductions, securitisation of aid, democratic backsliding, and intensifying geopolitical competition, the stakes of that claim have never been higher. Drawing on Global South-led action research on equity in evaluation, Oxfam GB's decolonisation work, and the case of France's feminist diplomacy, it surfaces the risks of evaluation being instrumentalised to legitimise exclusionary agendas. Short provocations are followed by Birds of a Feather exchanges and plenary synthesis.
Thursday 29 October — Practice, Struggle, and Harvest

S15d | Evaluation as Transformative Change: Power and Learning in Complex Systems

Facilitator(s): Jaynie Vonk (Oxfam Novib); Valerie Bey

Objective: Explore how feminist and decolonial evaluation design can surface non-linear change, shift power, and support systemic transformation.

Guiding questions:

  • How can evaluation capture non-linear, emergent, and contested forms of change?
  • When does participation risk becoming extractive rather than empowering?
  • How can evaluation speak to both donors and the communities and movements it engages with?

Keywords: Transformative evaluation; feminist evaluation; systemic learning; outcome harvesting; positionality; civic space

Grounded in the FAIR for ALL multi-country evaluation, this session uses a 'meet the evaluation' modality to bring together commissioner, evaluator, and user/partner perspectives. Rather than presenting polished results, it surfaces dilemmas, tensions, and trade-offs: how participatory design can shift evaluation from a top-down accountability mechanism to a democratic exercise; how evaluative inquiry can validate contributions of women and marginalised groups as strategic actors; and what remains non-negotiable when institutional constraints press in. Interactive segments invite collective inquiry into what transformative evaluation practice actually looks like under pressure.

S15e | Institutions, Donors, and Systemic Constraints: Aligning Evaluation Criteria with Feminist and Systemic Transformation

Facilitator(s): Karen Biesbrouck (Oxfam Novib); Sonal Zaveri (IDEAS Board, EvalGender+ Co-chair); Bijita Devsharma (Young Scholar, Gender Network Asia)

Objective: Identify institutional constraints and entry points for disrupting business-as-usual evaluation — and explore what feminist quality criteria would actually look like.

Guiding questions:

  • What institutional cultures and structures limit democratic evaluation practice?
  • Where are the entry points for change within donor-funded evaluation systems?
  • If MoFA is a feminist donor, what would a feminist Criterion 10A look like for evaluating systemic transformation?

Keywords: Feminist MEAL; IOB Criterion 10A; systemic transformation; decolonising evaluation; knowledge hierarchies; causal plausibility; FAIR for ALL; bureaucratic silencing

This session argues that the 'inadequate' ratings on IOB Criterion 10A rarely signal weak methodology — they expose a structural mismatch between prevailing quality criteria and the feminist, decolonial values required to evaluate systemic change. Using the F4A evaluation as a stress test, it exposes the costs of the rigidity-flexibility paradox and asks: what would evaluation quality criteria look like if they were designed to support, rather than stifle, social transformation?

The three-way dialogue (commissioner, IOB, evaluator) is anchored in the F4A case. Sonal Zaveri's 360 Accountability Approach provides a concrete proof of concept for what reimagined institutional accountability can look like — grounding the collective inquiry in an existing alternative rather than a hypothetical. The session also opens the donor conversation beyond the Dutch bilateral context, exploring how other institutional donors navigate the same tension.

S15f | World Café on Power, Participation, and Democratic Evaluation

Facilitator(s): Inka Bartošová / Petra Novakova

Objective: Harvest two days of strand learning through collective sensemaking — generating participant-authored propositions on power-aware evaluation practice.

Guiding questions:

  • Whose voices shaped the evaluation you are most passionate about — and whose were absent?
  • What example from your experience comes closest to communities designing evaluation from the start — and what made it possible?
  • What is one practice or institutional arrangement you want to change — and what is the smallest credible first step?

Keywords: World Café; Art of Hosting; participatory evaluation; democratic evaluation; collective sensemaking; power in evaluation

Rather than presenting findings, this session intervenes in the conference itself as a site of democratic practice. Using the World Café method — rooted in the Art of Hosting philosophy — it creates space for rotating small-table conversations that build cumulatively across three rounds. Participants bring their own lived experience regardless of theoretical orientation.

The session explicitly harvests the learning from Days 1 and 2 of the strand, with the plenary harvest feeding into the strand's Wall of Inquiry — a strand-wide sense-making mechanism that carries collective insights through to the closing session on Day 3. A final gallery walk and plenary synthesis produces collectively-authored propositions on power-aware evaluation practice, documented and shared with all conference participants.
Friday 30 October — Local Voices, Diverse Contexts, and Closing the Argument

S15g | Outcome Harvesting: Amplifying Local Voices to Support Inclusive Evaluation and Democratic Accountability

Time: 10:30 - 12:00

Presenter(s): Krisztina Varga (Key Impact); Sarah Johansen (Standley-Johansen Consulting); Awuor Ponge (EvalIndigenous Global Network); Sára Bori (IRC)

Objective: Demonstrate how Outcome Harvesting (OH) can amplify local voices, make expected and unexpected outcomes visible, and strengthen inclusive evaluation, accountability, learning, and evidence-informed decision-making across diverse and complex contexts.

Guiding questions:

  • How can Outcome Harvesting centre and amplify local voices while generating credible, evidence-based narratives?
  • What methodological and practical challenges arise when applying Outcome Harvesting across different sectors, contexts, and at scale?
  • How can participatory Outcome Harvesting approaches strengthen learning, accountability, and more inclusive decision-making?

Keywords: Outcome Harvesting; local voices; inclusive evaluation; democratic accountability; participatory evaluation; evidence-based learning; locally led development; systems change; adaptive learning

This panel brings together practitioners from the Outcome Harvesting community to explore how the methodology can make local voices and diverse forms of change more visible in evaluation. Outcome Harvesting is particularly suited to complex and dynamic environments, allowing evaluators to identify and analyse both expected and unexpected outcomes and work backwards to understand how interventions contributed to change.

The session presents four cases spanning humanitarian innovation and community resilience, locally led climate finance, education programmes at scale, and water, sanitation and hygiene systems change. Across these contexts, the presenters will share practical experiences of using Outcome Harvesting to capture locally grounded change, support accountability, and generate evidence-based narratives for learning and decision-making.

The session will combine short case presentations with interactive elements, giving participants an opportunity to practise and discuss the methodological and practical challenges of using Outcome Harvesting as a genuinely empowering and participatory evaluation approach. The discussion will focus on how evaluation can better support inclusion, transparency, local agency, and responsive decision-making.

S15h | Individual Paper Session